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Successfully automating your machines in the cloud using Ansible (June 2014)

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Abstract: As we have seen with the previous talk, "Red Pill, Blue Pill Virtual Machines and Virtual Environments" (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xZb3cr1JrMg), we can use Python to create virtual machines in the cloud. But, how do you "stamp" those machines differently? If you need to build a web server, mail server, DNS server, and load balancer, each machine may have the same base image but need to be configured differently. If you manually configure those machines, what happens when you suddenly have a surge in traffic and need four more web servers? Or, what if one finds a vulnerability in a library like Heartbleed in OpenSSL as we recently encountered. A very safe option would be to rebuild these machines from scratch. If they were built manually, rebuilding these machines within minutes from scratch would be daunting, tedious and error prone. There are several tools that have been built to fix this problem. Two of the most popular tools (Chef and Puppet) are written in the Ruby programming language. And, especially for the most popular, Chef, one needs somewhat of a familiarity with that language to use the tool. There are two more tools that are written in Python and are growing in popularity: Salt and Ansible. Ansible requires the least amount of set-up (if any) and has the simplest infrastructure (it simply uses commands over ssh like Fabric does). Ansible is the easiest tool to get started with if you are new to the machine build automation frameworks. We will start with a newly built machine and obtain it's public IP address. We will configure the ansible_host file with the IP address, and add/build plays (like recipes) to gradually configure that machine so that it is a Django web server running in the cloud. When we are finished, we should have a running machine and a recipe to easily build a seconded machine with a few keystrokes. P.S. If you haven't previously built an Amazon Web Instance, I highly recommend watching this video in advance of the talk: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xZb3cr1JrMg Speaker: Bio === Glen has been a full-time Python programmer since 2007 and has worked for companies such as IBM, UC Berkeley, Sprint, Informix, and many small start-ups. He has also worked both in the US and in the UK and has had Bioinformatics research published in "Nucleic Acids Research (Oxford Journals)". He is a certified DBA and has also been certified in Linux/Unix Administration. He currently works for a start-up, RepairPal (for accurate car repair prices) using Ruby on Rails and Ansible. Additionally, he runs a small start up, Glen Jarvis, LLC, that does online technical training and assists employees obtaining telepresence in their current work place. Glen is the organizer for the Silicon Valley Python MeetUp Group (http://www.meetup.com/silicon-valley-python/) and an active member in the Bay Area Python Interest Group (http://baypiggies.net/) organization. https://github.com/glenjarvis/ https://plus.google.com/u/0/+GlenJarvis/posts http://www.linkedin.com/in/glenjarvis

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